ARCADIA – On a day when Santa Anita officials were forced to cancel today’s nine-race card to allow workers an additional day to complete renovation on its Cushion Track, they received good news when it was announced the Breeders’ Cup will be coming to Arcadia for an unprecedented second consecutive year in 2009.

Oak Tree at Santa Anita, which last hosted the event in 2003, will host this year’s Breeders’ Cup on Oct. 24-25 – the fourth time Santa Anita will have hosted the Breeders’ Cup and the first under the current two-day format that was adopted last year.

Churchill Downs has hosted a record sixBreeders’ Cups.

The 2009 Breeders’ Cup will be run Nov. 6-7.

It’s believed the decision came down to Santa Anita and Churchill Downs, and Oak Tree executive vice president Sherwood Chillingworth said the Southern California weather might have been the deciding factor.

“I think that was a big part of it,” he said. “They were at Lone Star (in Texas in 2004), and that didn’t work very well. They went to Arlington (in Illinois in 2002) … and that didn’t work very well. And then they went to Monmouth (in New Jersey in 2007), which was a disaster.

“They’re tired of all that, so they want to go some place where they have a 95-percent chance they’re going to have sunny weather and good temperatures.

“And people like coming out to California. The women like to go shopping at Rodeo Drive, and you’ve got a lot of things to do out here, a lot of good restaurants, museums, libraries, all this kind of stuff that is something for people to do.”

Some industry officials also believe it was a marketing decision.

“To market one (event) two years in a row, there would be some gain in that,” said Hall of Fame trainer Richard Mandella, also a member of Oak Tree’s executive board. “To be the first to have the Breeders’ Cup two years in a row is really special, and Santa Anita is the place to do it.”

Chillingworth said the financial impact was instrumental.

“They can keep the buzz up until 2009 using fewer dollars,” he said. “Secondly, we put up a lot of what we call temporary seating and facilities, and if we can leave them up, not have the expenses of taking them up and putting them down and taking them up and putting them down, it saves a lot of dough.”

Mandella fondly recalls the last two times the Breeders’ Cup folks brought their show to town.

In 2003, the 57-year-old saddled four winners for earnings of $4,564,040 – both Breeders’ Cup records and considered perhaps the sport’s greatest single-day achievement.

“I’ve been living off that for a long time, and it might have to carry me a lot farther, actually,” Mandella joked.

In 1993, Mandella won two Breeders’ Cup races and two stakes on the Oak Tree undercard for earnings of $1,697,500.

Santa Anita president Ron Charles is appreciative of the fact Breeders’ Cup officials showed faith that track management will be able to rectify its synthetic-track problems long before this year’s event.

“It’s something that I feel terrific about in them being so supportive and having confidence in the fact that we’re going to have a good surface and we’re going to be able to put on just a great show two years in a row,” he said.

Charles is confident that today’s cancelation, the 11th of the season, will be the final disruption during an 85-day winter-spring meet that ends April20.

He said track superintendent Richard Tedesco and his crew would be working all night Thursday, finishing the application of the Pro-Ride polymer binders and the mixture of the fibers into the existing track in time for a limited number of horses to begin jogging and galloping over it sometime late this morning.

Charles anticipates the track being reopened for training at 4:30 a.m. Saturday and for racing to resume that afternoon for the first time in seven days.

“The racing surface just really seems to be in incredible shape,” he said. “There is such a cushion effect, such a bounce, and what we need to do, though, is make sure that’s consistent all the way around the track.”

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